Thomas the Obscure

Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot created the "new novel, " the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, "the ontological narrative"--a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.

Maurice Blanchot is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him. His work encompasses the writing of novels and recits as well as articles and books of philosophical (or to be precise anti-philosophical) criticism. He is one of the few significant theorists of literature of the last century to have worked outside a university context, yet for fifty years, he has been the most consistent champion of modern literature and its tradition in French letters.